Matching clinical and biological needs with emerging imaging technologies

Acquisition, analysis, and integration of medical images with nonimage biomedical information are essential for research and clinical practice. Individualization of health care, assessment of disease risk, tailoring of therapies, and lifelong monitoring places extraordinary demands on emerging technologies in medical imaging, information management, and molecular medicine. To achieve the anticipated benefits in outcomes that new technology can deliver, imaging informatics infrastructure and tools must be available to represent, store, integrate, and present the data in a useful manner. Currently, images are not well integrated with other forms of biological knowledge. This paper outlines the clinical and research requirements for imaging, and identifies barriers to progress and links these needs with the current and future informatics technologies that may overcome them.